White Girls

by Hilton Als

  Let me just say one reason I can talk about this at all is because of SL and Mrs. Vreeland—as I called her. They wanted my I, more than most other things, and what is writing but an I insisting on its point of view, fuck them for making me do it, fuck them and love them for making me do it. Let me just say, I never wanted my love or language to limit her and relegate her vibrancy, but that’s what time and illness did anyway, confine her body to a wheelchair, such sadness, I can’t even tell you. Imagine Holly Golightly or Sally Bowles or Maxine Faulk or Vera Cicero in the 1984 film The Cotton Club, infirm, not walking down the street or swimming with their boys in the sea, sick and feeling useless to themselves after all those years of creating such lasting, vibrant images in someone else’s mind, artists and writers for the most part, images that might include this one: a city girl walking somewhere, sometimes with a purse in hand, her fur wrap pulled tightly around her, a little snow falling, the memory of a lover’s kiss somewhere on her person, so many opportunities; sometimes life offered a quick, synthetic fix that felt like a million roses smothering them but then nothing, and that remarkable white girl rose from that temporary death to soldier on, and then her body struck down by some uncontrollable internal malady and tell me, SL, or someone, what’s left of that body and its own memories, the beautiful things artists who admired her made out of her? Wallace Stevens got it right when he said, in “So-and-So Reclining on Her Couch,” that his white girl was actually “This mechanism, this apparition, / Suppose we call it Projection A.” I can’t write one complete sentence about her because she was her own complete sentence, and her sentence about herself was better than anyone else’s because she uttered it sort of without thinking while thinking too much, I can’t tell you how unusual that is in a world where, nowadays, no one leaves the house without some kind of script. Still, her brilliance was in part contingent on knowing how the New York City script—a story of youth and ambition and race and blood and money—works and needs to work in order to be a story and therefore of value to other people; the human mind cleaves to details and what-happened-next so it can imagine what happened next, and I haven’t even told you enough of the story so you can imagine who she was and take it from there. She was a white girl who, while growing up in New Jersey, read Kurt Vonnegut and listened to punk music, and jazz. In high school, she sported a beret à la Rickie Lee Jones. She was a newspaper freak and, as a young woman, wrote letters in support of Rajneeshpuram despite the facts. She wanted to protect the faithful from the faithless. She regarded SL’s vegetarianism as a kind of faith, and she admired it, but how could she give up her belief in bacon? Her attraction to men who had language was profound. Sometimes she’d visit me at the weekly newspaper I worked at back in the day because she was also drawn to a pasty gay journalist who spread his body anywhere there was available space. She called him the Answer Grape because he looked like a grape, and he had all the answers. She was the daughter of Europeans, immigrants who’d survived a world war to find something like stability in North America, and their survivalist instincts may have contributed to her own, which included being very protective of her fun. When she was up to no good you could see it on her face, so, to some extent, she was always an innocent, albeit one who thought: You could consider doing the right thing, but you could consider doing the wrong thing, too. For as long as I knew her, she walked a moral balance beam in high heels without chalking up her hands; she was as interested in sometimes falling off that beam on a friend’s bad side as well as their good.

  The first time I saw her she was a waitress in a gay bar, were we even twenty-one years old? She was the lovely, ebullient, practical mind artists always love having around to remind them that the world exists, and Con Edison would like to hear from you—all while they painted her portrait. She worked in that bar in 1980, or 1981, and she was close to Jean-Michel Basquiat, who died in 1988, the summer she went to Europe with her first husband, a beautiful Berber boxer who was so kind to me, and when she got back from Europe we drove out to Brooklyn in her little car to visit Jean’s grave, just me and her, SL didn’t even know about that pilgrimage until after 2007, and at Jean-Michel’s grave in that Brooklyn cemetery, she kept saying, Poor baby, poor baby, as she toed the dead leaves away from his grave’s mouth. Standing there, looking down at her looking down, I remembered that Jean-Michel was indeed a baby when I met him; he was seventeen and I was sixteen. We were introduced by a fat and funny white girl who had an apartment in Brooklyn Heights. But is it an introduction if one of the two people won’t say hello and just stared? Because that’s what Jean-Michel did when he met me. We stood in that girl’s attic room in Brooklyn Heights; Jean-Michel had a Mohawk—I had never seen a black man with hair like that—and he was wearing a green mechanic’s jumper. He was so vibrant and hungry, predatory might be the word, he wanted to get somewhere, and he kept staring at me and it wasn’t until years later that I heard he liked black boys as much as he liked white girls. So I wonder what it was like for him when I showed up with Mrs. Vreeland—I called her Mrs. Vreeland from the first because she was stylish, and everything she wore was unfussy and the opposite of fashion and what did the first Mrs. Vreeland say about style? “It helps you get down the stairs.” My Mrs. Vreeland got down the stairs all right, but sometimes she tripped or stumbled, which is a form of being graceful, too, since what is grace but the desire to forget one’s body, or share it with others? She did both; I saw it all at one of Jean-Michel’s first big exhibitions. He was part of a group show called New York/New Wave, and oh my God I just looked it up—the show took place at PS1 in 1981. Like an Adrienne Kennedy heroine I would give anything just now if I could talk to Jesus that night, and just once. I would tell Jesus what I remember about that night. I would tell him what I remember about that night. Were we even twenty-one? Yes, we were, just, and I don’t think I even put the Jean who wouldn’t take my hand in Mrs. Vreeland’s presence together with the artist whose work I saw in a show I had admired tremendously some time before—The Times Square Show, a show that combined the refined and the dissolute: how perfect was that, since New York was a disaster area then so why couldn’t an exhibition be a disaster area, too? I don’t think I took much notice of Jean-Michel’s paintings at PS1, though, since what was interesting to me that night was watching and not watching as the artist sometimes watched me and looked at Mrs. Vreeland; I’d give anything to talk to Jesus about it just once because it was one of those moments when life was changing me and she was life, a skinny white girl talking to an existentially freaked black man and already I was in love with Mrs. Vreeland’s bravery: how many white girls do you know, Jesus, who didn’t grow up around colored people, and who step outside of what life is supposed to look like for them—which is to say, white—and put on a party dress to look pretty for, and try to please, a black man who almost never has any power at all? Those impulses are rarer than you think. I seem to remember the dress, if not the material, then the shape she wore that evening at PS1. The skirt was reinforced with a little, not much, crinoline. The artist and his muse talked to one another as lovers do; he was living with another woman by then, but I’m not sure if that was a heartbreak for Mrs. Vreeland because other people interested her as well. Besides, she liked her heart’s desires being a secret, a story only she could tell when she wanted to tell it. She was so intelligent about men and had realized at an early age that, despite the bluster, they were essentially passive creatures; you could get one if you wanted one, no problem. She was Fitzgerald’s Jordan Baker in that she was aware that it took two to have an accident, but she was herself when she said to me, once, as I tried to learn how to drive a car and was too frightened of other people: They have brakes, too. As Mrs. Vreeland and Jean talked to each other in a conspiratorial way at that opening, I became what I would always be, later, in her and SL’s presence, a kid loving the smell of their adhesion. How did people talk the way that Jean-Michel was talking to Mrs. Vreeland now, in the utter privacy of their souls, and yet in publi
c, for all the world to see? To talk to myself, even, I had to turn off the lights, as in a cinema.

  I met her through some queens I didn’t like but thought I should like, because they were queens. It was also the summer I met—through the same queens—a Dutchman who was spending time in New York; he had swapped his apartment in Amsterdam for a small place on East Fourteenth Street. (That’s the same Dutch guy I visited early on in my friendship with SL, when SL offered to come along to Amsterdam with me and I freaked out, early love will freak you out.) Eventually Mrs. Vreeland took the flat above him, he found her the place, and that was one of the things I never noticed about her until sort of late in our friendship: part of what her love demanded was to live in or near your actual home, I never understood what that meant other than the obvious. She was her very own crew on her very own Flying Dutchman. I fell in love with the Dutchman who ended up suffering a variation on a garbage-bag death, but in those years I was really much more in love with K, my college friend, the guy I would mourn in my stage-set apartment, sometimes with boys I paid to look like him. K was my heart’s desire, I took him to the bar where Mrs. Vreeland worked maybe a week or two after I met her because I loved her and I loved him, and the world was amazing! Amazing! Amazing! including Mrs. Vreeland’s willingness to be a Projection C as Wallace Stevens defined it. “She is half who made her. / This is the final Projection, C. / The arrangement contains the desire of / The artist.” Mrs. Vreeland not only affected this writer’s vision but the visual artist’s vision, too, Jean-Michel aside, there was SL remarking, soon after he met her, in 1988, referring to her carefully applied makeup: I’ve never known a white girl to use such colors, plus she doesn’t even like the Beatles! Later, looking at family photographs, SL pointed to a Modigliani reproduction that hung in his family dining room and said: I knew you before I knew you. SL also discussed, with a Japanese friend of Mrs. Vreeland’s, how her facial proportions resembled those in eighteenth-century ukiyo-e, or Japanese woodcuts. Also, curators who worked in the art field got her, too. One such curator said about Mrs. Vreeland once: I get it. She’s an old black man. Yes, I can see a little old Bojangles in her, why not, I saw everything else in her, she was one of life’s last great journeymen not to turn that experience into a career, she traveled from house to house learning from what was in her way but even though she longed for someone to make her a home I can’t ever remember her bringing a suitcase to that wish, she was always moving on, looking for a friend or a family, sometimes leaving whatever she’d acquired on her travels but more likely just throwing it away to stay light and keep everything moving, and it’s okay, Mrs. Vreeland, I’ll keep it with mine, like old Bob Dylan said, I’ll keep it with mine. But would she let anyone keep her but herself? She used to joke with SL and say that he was married to himself but Mrs. Vreeland you were like every human being on the planet in that what you saw in the person you loved most was the person you were frightened of most, which is to say yourself, and so I guess the world is full of twins, beings who are attracted to themselves even as they’re repelled by and drawn to that same-only-different equation. You spoke our language even before SL and I became a we. In the bar where we met I heard your tone before I heard what you were saying; each was interesting but let me just say I find nothing more charming than a white girl who speaks with a slightly black syntax. Then I heard you say: I looked up at the sky and booga oog fletmarx Karen Horney exstasis! Then you worked in a clothing store or somewhere else and you said: Aeghtakeeywow! Then you got married and went to Europe and Jean died and you said: OoopfmaniklyatranonicpooReich! You said: Eeegarwooootick! Radicalismoooggamindfloatchic! after you looked at SL for the first time, or maybe it was the third time. That was in 1988. You lived in a small walk-up in the West Village with your husband, who had a number of business concerns in the East Village. Life was just chugging along, and we weren’t even thirty. Suddenly, there was new love. What I recall of that new love was its beginning, which included SL and me escorting you to Jean-Michel’s memorial, and I could see as you sat close to both of us—we were your sentries, silent and stalwart—how you were moving away from one marriage to be married to SL, and did you ever know how that completed my we with SL? From the first you were necessary to his body and thus soul, and his loving you was one way for me to love you, too, without thinking my body would reduce you to a garbage bag. Jean-Michel died in August 1988, I can’t remember the day exactly but when I think of it the memorial service was in the fall, and by that winter you and SL were together, and I never told you how bereft I felt when you and SL would go off together to be married in your way and I just waited for my heart’s desire to return and then there you were again with the curl of your hip. But I don’t want to make a romance of their romance, which feels like such a slight word compared to marriage, which doesn’t do it, either. Shall I call it as I saw it? A twinship? In all our years together, I don’t think Mrs. Vreeland had much interest in people who weren’t romantically connected to other people she loved. And because she loved you, she wanted to have your experience not in a purely selfish way, but in an empathetically selfish way. She wanted to wear your heart on her sleeve. I can’t say she wanted to be me as I was in my we with SL, but I will say that she found our us as interesting as her considerable I. (One reason SL was attracted to the women he was attracted to, he said, was their self-interest; they weren’t ambivalent about his love and strengths, except when he wouldn’t let them have their way. From the first I was greedy for SL, too. I was always starving for him. I loved to learn, and he had so much to teach, ranging from his interest in graphic design to the world, with its multitude of worms. I know I loved SL, too, because he was an artist. My mother—my soul’s twin—somehow communicated to all her children that artists were exalted beings, and some of us fell in love with them over and over again. The world and the times she grew up in prevented my mother from being the dancer and artist she longed to be; she wore too-tight shoes for years to disfigure her feet so she would and would not remember that she had wanted to be a dancer in her youth. She wanted to prevent her children from going through any of this.) SL’s attachment to me wasn’t divisible from what she found such a turn-on about SL, which included his language, his authoritative, circuitous sentences and unimpeachable logic. Once, just for fun, I read to my friends from a story Veronica Geng published in 1978 called “James at an Awkward Age.” The piece sounded the way SL’s beautiful Negro speak sounded, and made Mrs. Vreeland feel. Maybe Mrs. Vreeland loved SL so because her soul felt like the way he sounded. Geng wrote:

  The NBC-TV sitcom “James at 16,” canceled in 1978, will inevitably resume in a new format. Episode One, “Pop Quiz”:

  Segment 1: Interior, the Berkeley Institute, a boys’ school in Newport, Rhode Island. The Reverend William Leverett has just finished lecturing on “Cicero As Such.” Boys stream from the classroom into the hall. JAMES and his only friend, SARGY, meet in front of James’s locker.

  SARGY: James, my man! (They shake hands.) Isn’t Leverett something else?

  JAMES: As to what, don’t you know? else he is—! Leverett is of a weirdness.

  SARGY: Say, my man, what’s going down?

  JAMES: Anything, you mean, different from what is usually up? But one’s just where one is—isn’t one? I don’t mean so much in the being by one’s locker—for it does, doesn’t it? lock and unlock and yet all unalterably, stainlessly, steelily glitter—as in one’s head and what vibes one picks up and the sort of deal one perceives as big.

  SARGY: Oh, I wouldn’t sweat it.